SEOUL, South Korea — With the election of Park Geun-hye as president on Wednesday, South Korea extended the tenure of its staunchly pro-American governing party and handed power to the daughter of South Korea’s longest-ruling dictator, the first woman to win the post in a deeply patriarchal part of Asia.
 
 Voters appeared to prefer stability over her opponent’s calls for radical change in how one of the world’s strongest economies addresses the new problems of slowing growth and a growing wealth gap, as well as perennial military threats from North Korea.
      
With all of the votes counted, according to the National Election Commission, the conservative Ms. Park won 51.6 percent of the vote compared with 48 percent for Moon Jae-in, a liberal stalwart.
“This is a victory for the people’s wish to overcome crises and revive the economy,” Ms. Park, 60, told her cheering supporters, who gathered in freezing weather in downtown Seoul to celebrate a woman whose steeliness in the face of adversity is legend.
 
      
According to her memoir, when told her father, Park Chung-Hee, was assassinated in 1979, she responded, “Is everything all right along the border with North Korea?”